Birthdays

Time was in the seventies and eighties when I had an exceedingly high opinion of my opinions about poetry, literature, movies, and music, and it followed that during the period I would share my opinions with you as to the aesthetic merits and sins of what cultural agents were trying to sell us. Rather, it was more like I was telling you how the world work or why it didn't work; I wasn't a philosopher, a politician, or priest. None of that. I was something better, a critic. My reviews were in the Reader, The Door, The UCSD Guardian, Kicks, The Triton Times, The Paper, tabloid pages were my means to have a say on lyrics, fumbled organ solos, botched metaphors, I was in love with my own voice as it said sour things about a whole lot of people places and things.

Not that I've come any more modest with time, but I've calmed down some since taking the pledge; being a drunk for twenty years with the arrogance I held onto is looping mindset that kept me drunk. Not to wander into a drunkalog here, but let us say that my phone stopped ringing, my prose was incoherent, my poetry naught but an angry page of typos. Getting older and sobering up, I'll say, are the best decisions I could have made under my reeking circumstances. It's a miracle that I was able to make the decision at all.



Well, here we are again, another pair of special occasions come and gone, and still, the novelty of turning 56 on my birthday and the celebrating a 21st sober anniversary hasn't worn off. When I was younger, in my thirties, this arrangement of back-to-back touchstone dates were my primary bragging rights, something I would share, no, declare to each stranger, work mate, attempted girl friend and luckless traveler. It became a standardized rap, a memorized monologue about miracles, phoenixes arising from stirred ashes, cruelties, indignations and various cheats against daily ethical limits, and the sure deliverance a horrible biography needed.

Sure enough, I was impressed with the results I'd experienced as a result of laying aside the bottle, but I was word drunk all the same, and often times a bore. With every success in work, love, career, with each disaster or middle state of the same, sobriety was my boilerplate, spirituality was the punch line, and the signature phrase was my length of sobriety was the number of years I was beyond my life expectancy. The miracle sounded canned, in other words, and I could hear myself going through my paces as if I were the person I was talking at (as opposed to speaking with).

Even I couldn't deny the staleness of the best phrases, how slack the cadences and rhythms had become. It was something I couldn't spice up, juice up, liven up no matter my efforts; the only thing left to make it interesting to dwell on such matters aloud would be to make things up, that is, to lie, but that was contrary to the point of staying sober in a fellowship constituted on a spiritual cure for my hopeless situation as someone who couldn't stop drinking by his own power. So I a sat in the back of the rooms where folks like me gather night by night, listening hard, making it a point to ask how other people were doing, letting them finish their answers ; the hardest part of this project to take a genuine interest in others was refraining from offering up my own version of the anecdote they might have shared, and to avoid giving intense forms of unsolicited advice on what they ought to be doing with their problems. Surely, it was a humbling experience realizing that those around me weren't problems to be solved or ills to be cured, but rather people with live no less difficult and no less blessed than my own. At 56 and 21 respectively, I think I might be getting the hang of that simple notion.

USED BOOKS: The Poems of Norman Mailer

Modest Gifts:Poems and Drawings
Norman Mailer (Random House Trade)

Some of us think Norman Mailer ought to win the Nobel Prize for literature because of the sure and quarrelsome genius of his books and the ideas they contained; like him or consider him an aberration in the culture, a number of the styles he took, particularly the novel, the essay and journalism, gave you a personality that was hard to ignore.

 Many who thought him a lout , a grind, an egomaniac had to admit, after reading him to counter his many assertions about many things, that Mailer was, after, a Great Writer. Joyce Carol Oates, an astute critic of Mailer, offered that Mailer's ideas were dangerous because he wrote so well.This, though, isn't one of those books," Modest Gifts" being, at best, a gussied up reissue of a lone book of verse he produced in the early Sixties,"Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)". Now, as then, the pieces are slight, skeletal, un-propelled by anything resembling a notion that the reader cares about. For a writer who's composed some of the richest prose and lyric flights this side of Faulkner and DeLillo, these efforts are so minimal that even a verbal skinflint like Hemingway would call these gifts not modest ,but cheap. The poems were written in the early sixties when the author had several professional , legal and marital crisis hanging over him, a situation that had given him writer's block and which, as a professional writer, placed an additional burden on him.

Brief, truncated in content, artless in the lack of interest of achieving the sort of ambiguity that is poetry's to apply to the senses, the poems are more like pained gasps of someone airing their gripes, bitches, and congested rage in a sequence of angular phrases. These are the kinds of things you might hear in an operating room when the patient's ether and pain killers wear off. The splintered style, rough and absent color, rhythm or graceful metaphor, is what Mailer wanted to present the public, though, and thought it in his best interest to write about his troubles in a language that lacked the elegant buttressing his essays and journalism could achieve. Of interest to scholars, perhaps, who can examine these puny bits in context with the larger body of work--many of his life long obsessions are to be found here--the reader desiring Mailer's talent for metaphor, adjective and metaphysical fancy had best look elsewhere for some of the brilliance some of us claim for him; this volume is an embarrassment in the late author's career. Mailer explains interestingly that these were put together at a bad time in his life when he could not compose--stabbing your wife will tend to dampen your willingness to wax--and that he found something therapeutic in their existence, but there never has been a compelling reason for these things to be put between covers and sold. Unlike some, I think that a great writer's less great work, the unformed work, the jottings, the juvenilia,the notebooks, the scraps and crumbs, need to remain in the drawer, and not committed to the judgment of history. This poetry is so minimal that it can't even raise a stink.

USED BOOKS: Novels by Richard Powers and Mark Costello

1. The Time of Our Singing
a novel by Richard Powers
The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers is an amazing novel, an ambitious generational tale of an American family with a mixed heritage of African-American and German Jew, and covers the travails, triumphs and tragedies of this family. There are three children, one with a beautiful singing voice who opts for a classical music career, a daughter who becomes involved with the civil rights struggle,and a second brother who, though gifted as well, buries his ambition to bridge the gap between his siblings. Not a perfect novel--sometimes Powers' superb style turns into a list of historical events as a means to convey the sweep of time-- but the central issues of race, identity, culture are handled well within the story. He grasps inexlicable contradictions--there are scenes when one believes that prim and closested bigots are about to have their hearts changed forever as they listen to the heaven sent, transcendent voice of the young man, only to resort to their unshakeable racism once the music has finished--and offers up the idea that what prevents justice and good will from prevailing more often is because of the collective and individual fear that no one wants to admit their world view is limited, wrong, and harmful to life on the planet. The writing is generous and frequently beautiful, especially at the moments when the description turns to the music. Powers, as well as any one, describes how notes played the right way can make one believe in heaven and the angels who live there.


The Big If
a novel by Mark Costello

First, this author isn't to be confused with another fiction writer named Mark Costello, who is the author of two brilliant collections of short stories called The Murphy Stories and Middle Murphy.Those books, a series of related tales involving the title character, is a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for a generation growing up in Illinois, and it is one of the most beautifully written sagas of dysfunction, alcoholism and despair I've ever come across. This Costello does things with the language that take up where prime period John Cheever or John Updike left off and offer up a virtuoso prose only a handful of lyric writers achieve; it is the brilliance and beauty of the writing that makes the unrelieved depressive atmosphere of the two books transcend their own grimness. The prose in these two books demonstrate the slopper pretender Rick Moody cannot help but seem. Buy these books and experience a devastating joy.

The otherMark Costello, a younger writer, has equal genius but a different approach to the world, and his novel Big If is quite good, and what makes it work is that Costello accomplishes the dual difficulty of handing us a small town/suburban comedy the likes of John Cheever would have admired, and the other is with the rich detailing of the other secret service agents who work with Vi Asplund. There is something of a domestic comedy seamlessly interwoven with a skewed Washington thriller, with the elements of each spilling over and coloring the underlying foundations of both. In the first part of the novel, we have an atheist Republican insurance investigator who has a habit of crossing out the "God" in the "In God We Trust" inscription on all his paper money, replacing the offending word with "us". Vi, years later, winds up in a job where "in us we trust" is the operating rational, as she and her fellow agents strive to protect their protected from the happenstance of crowds, acting out on intricate theories and assumptions that can only be tested in the field.

Costello is wonderful at the heightened awareness in the ways he presents his details , his comic touches, A beautiful agent who still receives alimony checks from her smitten ex husband carries on a correspondence with him via the memo line of the checks, where he continually writes "come back to me". She writes "No, never" each time, deposits the check, knowing that her ex will see the reply when he receives the canceled checks. The book is full of these fine touches. We have a sense that it's the small things, the small frustrations as much as the larger disasters that conspire against our happiness. A fine book.

USED BOOKS:Satan, His Pyschotherapy and Cure by The Unfortunate Dr.Kassler, J.S.P.S

Satan, His Pyschotherapy and Cure by The Unfortunate Dr.Kassler, J.S.P.S
By Jeremy Leven (AuthorHouse)


No one has ever done a subtler or a more devastating send up of the psychiatric/psychology industry, nor have many been able to insinuate sly philosophical digressions into a frothing satiric text with such grace and pacing. This satan, faceless, locking himself inside a computer in a public gallery, has the charm to coax a snake out of new skin. The complications are wonderfully wild and orchestrated, and Kassler's travails as a single dad trying to rekindle a relationship with his children are heart breaking as they are potently hilarious.
I'm among those who've loaned out various copies of this book and have had to replace it with replace editions, not an easy task considering that the book is out of print. This novel needs to come back into print from a major publisher at a reasonable price, as the current edition from vanity press AuthorHouse is an arm and both legs at $27.95. The cost stops more people from discovering one of the best bits of black humor since the glory days of Naked Lunch; no one has better gotten the sheer hysterical intensity of the moment when one is facing impossible evil and finding something to laugh at dispite the oncoming despair and horror. Dispite the onslaught of misfortune that comes down upon the haplass doctor, the book also is about shouldering one's share of the common burden and dedicating themselve to the good work that must be done no matter the personal grief that distracts and irritates. Satan is indeed cured in this novel, and one needs to read it to get the kind of genius that's been missing in American satiric writing for too long, far too long. Author Leven has given us one of the best structured, best written American comic novels, and its a disservice to the reading public to keep it out of print

Robert Kelly on science

I have this poem "Science" by Robert Kelly posted over my desk at work, and what I like about is that it gets the feeling of someone talking to himself, under their breath, but speaking nearly full sentences, referring to an unspecified other to whom the comments are intended. The element of eaves dropping comes into play , the effect you get when you only hear one side of a phone conversation or what's being said in the next booth in a noisy Denny's; the poem has another dimension, a countervailing polemic that is conspicuous by being unstated, unheard. As readers , we demand that things we bother to glance over make sense, and so we speculate, interpret, fill in the gaps to have the portions presented make at least theoretical sense.


Science explains nothing
but holds all together as
many things as it can count
science is a basket

not a religion he said
a cat as big as a cat
the moon the size of the moon
science is the same as poetry
only it uses the wrong words.

The leaps, gaps and goofy intrusions of odd comparisons may distract and annoy some readers, but I happen to like the disjunctions; broken syntax, interruptions, the overlaying of point, counterpoint and further contradiction gives this poem the verbal ambiguity that would make you pause a little, consider the implication of an accidental connection.

You wonder how science comes to be compared to a basket, or why the subject the moon and its size have to do with anything the speaker and his unknown friend were talking about, but they do fit neatly into the introductory notion of whether the methodology can indeed explain the world to us, or does it merely record what researchers observe, without an idea of the crucial "why" behind the function these processes have. Hence, science is compared to a basket, something which contains loose ends gathered from hither and yon, connected only by the method in which they're gathered. Hence, science is compared to poetry, which describes the world and the experience in it with a language that is barely accurate enough. But whatever one comes to refer to science as, all that it attempts to dissect and explore and extract meaning purpose from remains a unknown, it remains a mystery.
Kelly, a bit of the mystic for whom poetry connects one to instinctual knowledge rather than the measured, indexed and delineated, tells us that science is just like poetry, but that it uses the wrong words. The words he wants give us bearings in the flux and sway of a life's accumulating events and yet retain the sensation, the anger, the joy of being alive to what is arriving, while science is all subject to materialist verification. In a rational world, I would side with the scientists and , but I'm not always rational. There are times when precision will kill the soul faster than the surest poison.

Playgrounds and Catechism

I was one of the those lucky enough to attend Catholic School for grade school, junior high and early high school, and it was, to be sure, an odd place to go through the awkward teenage blues; one's obsessions with comic books, monster movies and an bewildering and growing fascination with girls mixed in delicious confusion with the discipline and moral instruction given us by nuns as to the purpose of the Church and the mission being given to it's young members. It made for radical shifts in focus when the bell rang indicating the end of recess, when all the rude jokes, dirty talk, leering and horsing around stopped abruptly and some institutional rigor entered one's spine, and surreal attentiveness to what nuns and lait teachers were saying came over otherwise expressive faces. Charles Grosel gets it mostly right with his poem "In the Fourth Grade", a succinct an artful blur of external forces vying for a young man's attention. It lacks, however, the third act, the additional detail that would elevate this above oh-hum irony that keeps too many poems chained to the earth. This is a poem that should have soared high and grand.

One might be too severe in deriding the comparison between catechisms and Adventure cards, but both both have something to do with what role is too play in the world; one learns their parts, becomes aware of their weaknesses, and pursues their ends for a good that is , finally, greater than oneself. Catechism, it should be said, is simply the first layer of a Catholic Theology that is about as sophisticated and textured view of man's place in the universe which God created and how one may best use the abilities and skills they've been gifted with to make way through an pitiless existence for the purpose of bringing some of His grace and goodness to this life. It is a whole system , elaborate beyond the basics regular catechism outlines, and in that a central tenet is that Man has free will and must intuit and intellect his way through ambiguous circumstances to move toward teh good , the goal, shall we say, entails honing strategy skills and such no less than what pop culture past times offer.Adventure cards, as Grosel calls them, in fact mirror the Christian mythology that institutions like the Catholic Church have developed a substantial moral philosophy from.

I suppose what the poet is getting at is that the boy, attempting various cool hoodlum poses and such before the bell rings and the lines form, drops his mannerisms and learned street attitudes and takes on the proper behaviors and deference the nuns expect of him and the other fourth graders. Conversion, in this sense, is a pun, a weak one, in that one can relate this to how one converts currencies; the young man here converts his playground attitude to one that enables him to get along under the sister's watchful eye. It doesn't work, though, and something more is needed, another idea besides the easy resolution involving conversion experience is required. We have, as is, a well turned construction that delights with the indirect rhymes and disguised alliteration that lacks the third act; Billy Collins, or better, Thomas Lux would have been able to twist the readers off the neck. This is merely sweet and feeble by the end.



As far as it goes, the poem is a fine bit of observation to my mind, and Grosel treads lightly with the parallels he brings to our attention; some other poets would have talked the comparisons into submission, others would have pounded you over the head, while still others would have choked on the incoherence they were creating. Not so with this writer, who maintains his balance, does not lose his cadence, keeps his emphasis visual, and terse. The poem is fine for what it sets out to do, and the only failing , for me, comes with the ending, which was too easy, too obvious a matter to deploy, but which is not irredeemable with a smart revision.


I suppose what the poet is getting at is that the boy, attempting various cool hoodlum poses and such before the bell rings and the lines form, drops his mannerisms and learned street attitudes and takes on the proper behaviors and deference the nuns expect of him and the other fourth graders. Conversion, in this sense, is a pun, a weak one, in that one can relate this to how one converts currencies; the young man here converts his playground attitude to one that enables him to get along under the sister's watchful eye. It doesn't work, though, and something more is needed, another idea besides the easy resolution involving conversion experience is required. We have, as is, a well turned construction that delights with the indirect rhymes and disguised alliteration that lacks the third act; Billy Collins, or better, Thomas Lux would have been able to twist the readers off the neck. This is merely sweet and feeble by the end.

Whiteness

When in doubt, slap a new coat of paint on an old idea and hawk it as something brand spanking fresh, as in the case of the folks who started up the site Stuff White People Like .Well, yeah, I laughed at this, recognized the material things we as a light skinned privledged gather about us, and then wearied of the whole notion of this satire. It's a riff that's been played into submission, like hearing the umpteenth posthumous live version of Hendrix playing "Red House" or the final "must-see" episode of the current season of Law and Order; try(and lie) as you might, there's nothing especially surprising at this point in Hendrix's drugged guitar fumblings, and the unexpected twist or turn of the legal scenario of that L/O storyline, the one that would simply stun you even though this show has been on the air for 18 years, is simply a hyped -up run through of old plot lines, old outrages, with the twists arriving on time, on schedule.Making fun of white people has been a dependable staple of comedians for years, a safe haven for those times when you have a need to deride, insult or stereotype an entire population with the most reductionist jibes. 

The sweet part of the deal is that one can indulge this stale diversion with impunity, as no one will muster the nerve or umbrage to yell foul; Richard Pryor through Dave Chapelle can mock the doings of the lighter hued race sans a protest, and white comedians will do it to their own kind because the current tone is zero toleration for a discouraging word said about anyone, on any terms, for any reason. Except white people. It's lopsided, yo. Gore Vidal remarked in the Sixties that homosexuals were the last minority group that one could make fun of and get away with, but times, attitudes and the strength of group pride changed all that. There remains the need to mock someone. White people are it. It may well be our turn in the barrel to many people's thinking, but that sort sort defeats the purpose of judging people by character, not skin color. This is progress?

"Post-racial" is a preferable state for the world to fall into, but meanwhile racial and ethnic matters are as touch as they've ever been. Ethnic cleansings are a very recent memory, and the GOP's hard right flank isn't shy about unloading racist stereotypes in their opposition to Obama's policies. Still, there remains , codified in our ethics, our laws, and our basic sense of decency, the notion that invective aimed at blacks, hispanics, gays, women, Asians and others is "wrong" , and evidence of a disturbed mind. I wouldn't argue against that; racists have to be censured, the message that it's not okay to denigrate anyone for matters of race, gender, sexual preference is unacceptable. My point though, is, that making fun of those of paler skin and European heritage is okay. No one in an official capacity, or any level of cultural influence, will arise and advise the rest of us , indeed remind us, that reducing a population to the sum of their stereotypes is not the way a more just and tolerant culture is created.